The link building process can be a time-consuming one, causing many webmasters to look for ways to speed it up. If your goal is to acquire quality adult links, and it should be, you’ll find there are many aspects of link building that just take time. It is, however, possible to save time on some parts of the process by using automation tools or other methods. The trick is knowing where you can take steps to speed things up without hurting the quality of your links.
If you just want to add a bunch of links to your site without regard to quality there is nothing stopping you — whether you should do so, however, is another question. In virtually every case this is not the best approach to take, as low-quality links often hurt more than they help. This month’s column provides a detailed look at which parts of the process can be sped up without harming link quality, which can’t, and how to go about speeding things up where possible.
High-quality content furnishes the energy behind effective link building. If you want to attract links from reputable sites, placing content on your site that your visitors want to read and share will improve your chances of gaining links.
Link Requests
Some link builders prefer sending out a flood of emails to potential link partners and then researching the quality and appropriateness as links of the ones that respond. Others take a front-loaded approach, doing some research into sites before sending emails to those deemed most appropriate. Either approach can work — the one you choose is likely to depend on your personal preference as well as the industry you operate in.
It’s not clear that one of these approaches is necessarily less time-consuming than the other in the long run — if you send out bulk invite emails you will still need to research any potential links that respond to avoid acquiring low-quality links. However, there are parts of the lead-building process which lend themselves to speed via the use of automation, including identifying potential links.
Link Target Identification
Scrolling the web for potential partners to send link requests to can take a lot of time. Even if you are sending out mass link requests, acquiring and compiling lists that are relevant to the adult industry can take a fair amount of effort. To speed up the process, you can use automation. Discovery software can be employed to identify websites that fit specified criteria, saving the time that would otherwise be required to accomplish the same task manually.
Besides speeding up the discovery process, using software of this type enables you to identify leads you might not have discovered otherwise. However, it still may be worthwhile to have someone manually look at potential links identified this way to eliminate any that don’t meet SEO quality standard’s before you send out your link request emails.
Content Marketing
High-quality content furnishes the energy behind effective link building. If you want to attract links from reputable sites, placing content on your site that your visitors want to read and share will improve your chances of gaining links. While it’s possible to quickly create content, either by yourself or by hiring somebody to do the job, taking this approach is not likely to yield content of high quality.
Creating good content, whether you outsource the task or create it with internal resources, is intrinsically time-consuming. Because of this, content creation is not an area where you should cut corners to help speed up the link building process. Give content creation the time it needs and look for other ways to rapidly build links.
Collecting Contact Info
Even after you gather the names of potential link partners, acquiring the contact info of the current webmaster for a site is essential to improve the efficacy of your link building efforts. Doing this manually is not all that difficult, but it can take a fair amount of time. This process is ripe for using a collection tool that provides contact info for the sites you are interested in. The quality of contact info gained this way may not be flawless, so be sure to spot check the information so that you aren’t contacting the wrong webmaster when you make a link request.
Link Research
Once you’ve identified sites to contact, either before or after you’ve received a response from them, due diligence should be performed to determine if the site is relevant for linking purposes, unaffected by penalties, and meets the guidelines set by your client or the firm you work for. This is not a process that is easy to speed up – or even one that should be. To ensure that you are only adding quality links to a site thorough due diligence is essential. If you use shortcuts you are likely to end up with low-quality links that can hurt your SERPs ranking. If your focus is quantity over quality, shirking on due diligence may be an acceptable way to save time in the process – if not, take the extra time necessary to properly research potential links.
Link Outreach
To reach out to potential partners for linking purposes you need to craft emails or messages to send via social media. Composing these messages can take some time, as you are likely to achieve the best results if you personalize the messages as much as possible. The best way to speed up the process is to do some research into the sites you are sending emails to in advance. This allows you to compose template emails that only need minor alterations before sending out. Whether you should take this approach or rely on completely personalized messages is a matter of preference – personalization can result in more replies, but the greater time investment can slow down the process.
Social Media Outreach
You can use automation to speed up this process by scheduling content publication to take place at the time of your choice. Be careful of scheduling content publication too far in advance, as changing circumstances can mean that your content is irrelevant or inaccurate by the time it is published. Make sure to spot check your content before its publication date to make sure it is still suitable and hasn’t been rendered inaccurate by events which occurred between the date publication was scheduled and publication. You should also avoid publishing too frequently and inundating your followers with similar content.
Summing Up
While there are ways to speed up the process, building quality links is, to large degree, an inherently time-consuming task. Cutting corners when link building can cause you to spend more time than you might like removing low-quality links from your site. Given the degree of difficulty and time investment involved in building high-quality links, the process is often outsourced. Whether you take this approach to link building or do the work yourself, manually reviewing link requests to ensure that the quality of the site’s link partners is high is essential. To maximize efficiency without compromising link quality, focus your efforts on other areas of the process such as identifying potential link partners, collecting contact info, link outreach, and social media.
Adrian “Yo Adrian” DeGus is a 15-year adult industry veteran and founder of AdultSEOPartners.com, a professional adult SEO agency catering to large established adult sites. DeGus, who has provided advanced consulting services to many leading sites in the adult industry, also operates Adult SEO Training, a popular service that helps webmasters, program operators and affiliate managers to learn in-house SEO.
